Latency and Throughput

Latency is the
time between making a request and beginning to see a result. Some
define latency as the time between making a request and the
completion of the response, but this definition does not clearly
distinguish the psychologically significant time spent waiting, not
knowing whether a request has been accepted or understood. You will
also see latency defined as the inverse of throughput, but this is
not useful because latency would then give you the same information
as throughput. Latency is measured in units of time, such as seconds.

Throughput is the number of items
processed per unit time, such as bits transmitted per second, HTTP
operations per day, or millions of instructions per second (MIPS). It
is conventional to use the term
“bandwidth” when referring to
throughput in bits per second. Throughput is found by adding up the
number of items and dividing by the sample interval. This calculation
may produce correct but misleading results because it ignores
variations in processing speed within the sample interval.